Somebody is trying to put together a stage musical version of The Man Who Fell to Earth, Nicolas Roeg's 1976 science fiction classic, and park it on Broadway, and it has been reported in the British press that David Bowie, who starred in the movie, is working on the project with director Peter Schaufuss, with an eye towards lending him the rights to some of his songs. Now David Bowie has announced that it's news to him. An official notice posted on Bowie's website quotes a "spokesman" as saying, "We have licensed absolutely no material written by Mr. Bowie to Schaufuss. We have never been requested to and we do not intend to," adding, "We are close to the Walter Tevis Estate and we have and have first hand knowledge that they have not licensed the musical rights to The Man Who Fell To Earth to Schaufuss either." (Tevis wrote the novel on which Roeg's movie was based. He's one of those lucky writers whose names have been kept alive thanks mostly to the movies' versions of his work: he also wrote the novel The Hustler and its sequel, The Color of Money, which lent its title, but not much else, to the screenplay that Richard Price eventually wrote for the sequel to the movie version of The Hustler.)
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